Best Practice, Bushido Style

Bushido is a tricky game. On the one hand, it pushed genre boundaries in tabletop RPGs when it emerged and, despite being the product of Western writers holding forth on someone else’s culture, it’s actually aged reasonably well on that front; authors Bob Chartette and Paul Hume gave every impression of having done their research and made a very wise decision to say “this is set in a fantasy version of Japan we will call ‘Nippon’ to distinguish it from the real Japan, the two will diverge in important respects and we encourage you not to conflate them”, as well as being fairly forward thinking for 1970s game designers when it came to saying “yeah, let’s have women warriors if you like, we can diverge from historical norms and assumptions for the sake of a more enjoyable experience”. Despite a system which is rather of its time, it’s aged better than you would expect.

At the same time, it’s had incredibly sparse support over the years – a consequence in part of the fire-and-forget approach taken for much of its history by publisher Fantasy Games Unlimited, who long took an approach of picking up games looking for a home, unleashing a core book, and then kind of not bothering with a support line unless the game’s creators or highly motivated fans were willing to put in the work essentially themselves to cook up product proposals. (The major exception seems to be Villains & Vigilantes, which seems to be the one RPG from FGU to really get a sustained promotional campaign behind it.) This does mean there’s a bit of a gap when it comes to the question of what you actually do with the game.

Despite this, though, Bushido ended up sustaining a fanbase for a surprisingly long time for a product which was essentially tossed out onto the marketplace and left to sink or swim. Thanks to sales of imports and coverage in magazines like White Dwarf it seems that the UK managed to develop a small but enthusiastic Bushido fanbase – enough for the game to pop up in the Arcane top 50 RPGs poll in the mid-1990s despite over a decade of neglect by FGU. In fact, it managed to get the number 17 spot, which considering some of the games it beat (including then-hot material like Rifts, Earthdawn, and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) is incredibly good going.

Now, to be fair, whilst Bushido had very little support beyond the core set at that point, it didn’t have no support; beyond those magazine articles, a smattering of adventure material came out in the early 1980s, and more recently FGU made a return to the line. One of these products would offer an interesting model of best practice when designing Bushido scenarios. The others… would not follow best practice.

Valley of the Mists

Designed by Bushido co-creator Bob Charrette, this is pretty much the only source material beyond the original core rules that FGU ever put out in the game’s early years, and is mainly significant for how it sets the model for subsequent published scenarios. Opening with a rundown of mountainous Hida Province which gives an overview of the basic terrain, the general political situation, and the disposition of the samurai clans, yakuza, and ninja in the area (as well as a cantankerous hermit-wizard who could be a potential contact for the player characters and an overview of the main town of the area), it then provides two plot-based scenarios and a sandbox area for exploration.

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The first scenario is the best-developed one; entitled The Oyabun’s Secret, it does a fine job of setting up its basic premise, giving some action to get the ball rolling, and then largely stepping back to allow the players’ actions to determine what direction things go in next (though sufficient support is given to adjudicate the most likely next course of action). The second one, The Daimyo’s Peril, feels a little more muddled – you can piece together what the backstory is and what the PCs are expected to do in order to get involved and the intended resolution, but it could really do with an introductory overview at the start so you don’t have to sweat to piece this together in the first place.

In both cases the use of fantastic non-humans (referred to in those terms instead of as “monsters”, interestingly enough) is interesting; basically, they’re used to provide some old-school dungeoneering action in the adventure, whilst the human side of things unfolds in more realistic and conventional locations. In the case of The Oyabun’s Secret, it would be entirely viable to revise the scenario to be wholly non-fantastic; a crucial NPC would need to be revised to be human, but otherwise it would all work just fine as a Lone Wolf and Cub-esque action-and-betrayal yarn. The Daimyo’s Peril, on the other hand, is intrinsically a curse narrative, and so is less amenable to such repurposing.

As for the sandbox area – the titular valley – this dials up the supernatural aspects to the extreme. It really is a genuine sandbox, in the sense that no assumed agenda for visiting the place is hardwired in, so PCs could show up merely following up on rumours of fabulous treasures hidden there, or seeking a supernatural edge to deal with a different matter, or whatever.

And that’s where Valley of the Mists is rather neat – all of the scenarios therein can be potentially interwoven with each other in intriguing ways, and give the players a lot of leeway in how they tackle them. Add to this a healthy agnosticism as to what the exact makeup of the PC party will be – and suitable guidance for getting characters of all flavours involved in the plotted scenarios – and you end up with a scenario set which can play out extremely differently depending on party makeup; a high-class group of samurai and retainers might tackle this very differently from a clique of roguish yakuza and ninja.

The product is also clearly the result of Charrette’s own home campaign – there’s a little text box at the end outlining how things panned out in his own game, and ideas for how your own outcome might differ and what consequences might arise. As such, it’s about as good a snapshot of what you’re meant to do with Bushido as the game ever offered, much like Keep On the Borderlands by Gygax offered perhaps his best overview of how campaign play in D&D is meant to work in practice. (Many of Gygax’s other early scenarios, by contrast, originated as tournament modules, and so don’t really reflect what he’d consider best practice for a home game due to the unusual aspects of that format.)

Takishido’s Debt

The other Bushido scenario pack released in the 1980s was this effort by Steve Bell, and it didn’t come out through FGU – instead, it’s a third party product from Games of Liverpool. As the name implies, they were a UK-based game shop back in the day, so if there was a local buzz around Bushido it makes sense that to cater to that Games of Liverpool might have tried to dip their toe into publishing provided they could get permission (which they did).

They don’t seem to have repeated the experiment, however. In some respects that’s a shame, because there’s some interesting layout ideas here, with each page having general scenario information in the left-hand column and NPC stats in the right-hand column, including checkmarks for hit points for ease of mid-combat bookkeeping.

At the same time, the scenario isn’t much to get excited about. It’s very railroady, the most non-linear section being a dungeon sequence thrown into the middle more or less superfluously, and it makes a ton of assumptions about where the characters’ sympathies lie. It also seems to assume that the characters being captured and humiliated is a highly likely outcome, if the amount of information devoted to such a resolution is anything to go by. The illustrations veer away from the comparatively realistic approach taken in FGU’s material and instead consist of rough sketches that are clearly by someone who wanted to draw some cool-ass ninjas and didn’t bother to do any research on how ninjas dress outside of American comics; there is basically no resemblance between the illustrations and the historically inspired aesthetic of the game, making them a poor fit that adds to a general air of half-assedness.

Honor Bound

This emerged in 2016, with FGU boss Scott Bizar heralding it in his editorial note as the first of a new wave of support for Bushido, though this seems to have dried up subsequently – there’s this, A Tale of Honor Lost, and The Path of Honor, and that’s about it.

Written by Stephen Deadman, this features art which feels simultaneously more authentic than that in Takishido’s Debt in terms of its basic look, but also several notches more cartoonish and slapdash than that in Valley of the Mists or the core rules, and ultimately the material feels like a weak imitation of Valley; the description of the local province is more perfunctory and less interesting, and offers less hooks for continuing shenanigans once the main adventures have been played, the scenarios themselves are quite linear in a somewhat boring fashion (with plenty of blanket assumptions about what the players choose to do), and the scenario largely caters to bushi (warriors) and ninja with little to no material catering to other classes, meaning it may well be near-useless for some parties. On the whole, it’s uninspiring.

It does gain points for having a bibliography, so at least some research has been done; it loses points because the only text in the bibliography written by a Japanese person is Lone Wolf and Cub and come on, seriously? I realise that’s a super important influence on the game, but equally I feel like there must be some nonfiction that can be cited which isn’t non-Japanese people Westsplaining aspects of Japenese culture.

A Tale of Honor Lost

This is penned by Jeff O’Hare, and has if anything an even shallower depiction of the province it takes place in and an even more railroaded plot – there’s a single scenario which is rather linear. Oh, sure, there’s some choices to be made, but they tend to be either “do what the scenario clearly wants you to do for the purposes of the plot” or “get punished for not following the planned plot”. This, at least, overcomes the issues Honor Bound had with only catering to two character types – it pretty much doesn’t bother to consider player characters types and capabilities, so everyone is equally impoverished.

On the whole, though those magazine articles in the likes of White Dwarf may well have kept the flame going, it really does seem that as far as full Bushiso products go Valley of the Mists is the last decent one, not least because Charrette seems to understand some concepts other authors don’t:

• If you add sufficient hooks to the province you are setting the adventure in, you add a ton of value and scope for continued play.
• Bushido is a game where different character types have very different faculties and interests, and you should try to provide something for everyone.
• Setting up a situation and leaving the resolution open-ended is a power move.
• Maybe dial back on seppuku as a consequence of failure – Honor Bound and Takishido’s Debt seem excited by the prospect of PC seppuku in a way that Valley of the Mists avoids.

As a result of all this, I’d recommend Valley of the Mists as a case study of how this sort of product can be done right, offering both setting flavour and open-ended action that can potentially go anywhere all within a compact page count. The rest strikes me as pale imitation.